Topic: Executive Director of Bitcoin Foundation is incompetent and dangerous to Bitcoin (Read 6086 times)

CoinLab*

Nice to know we're on your mind though

If you think they're so important, fork the client and add those features to your version (or pay someone to do it). As long as it can be done on top of the current network and block chain, there's nothing holding you back. That's open source. There is no need for "the" devs to add anything to "the" client. You don't even need their approval.   People that want your features will use your client.

Then again, the current devs are not *against* privacy or anonymity features. Otherwise, TOR support would have been removed instead of improved in recent versions. It simply doesn't have the priority that you'd like it to have, because there's many other things left to be done before the label of "-beta" can be removed. So layering complex systems on top of the base transactions is left to others for now.

I see a lot of lip service being paid to this "anonymous transactions" idea. A lot of ideas and big discussions, but no one really taking it all the way to an implementation. There are attempts such as "coin control", but that leaves all the burden on the user, and mostly provides a false sense of anonymity.

The Open Transactions project has done a lot of work on (mathematically) anonymous transactions and it can be used with Bitcoin. Maybe you could take a look at that if you're truly serious about this.

Bashing an organization that wants to take Bitcoin to the bigger public, just because you don't agree with a part of their priorities, is very non-constructive and won't help you advance your own goals at all.

You are nuts.

Real anonymity is impossible in bitcoin, and difficult to approximate.  He isn't saying that he doesn't care about anonymity, he's saying it is hard.

I do not just "wish anonymity upon the code", see Automatic Coin Mixing Idea or P2P coin mixing



Generally, smart people do not lose their money to scammers, so I don't think there should be even a choice between preserving financial privacy or making it a little harder to scam someone.



Sometime there is benefits in giving up some privacy as a trade off, but I disagree with the implication that it should be an easy choice.



If Bitcoin client has feature such as Automatic Coin Mixing Idea or P2P coin mixing that would make the cost of uncovering someone's identity astronomically high, but mathematically speaking you're correct.



I am not sure if it is an irony or not, so I am going to take it for the face value. We can certainly speculate that it is the master plan, but I didn't see much that would support it.



Probably, most of it is currently true, but it doesn't have to be this way, there is a fairly easy fix.



Unless Peter Vessenes clarifies his statement, I can assume that he doesn't care if Bitcoin users will have less privacy.



I do not believe that we should give up our financial privacy because people getting scammed or use Bitcoin for illegal transactions.

I believe that financial privacy is very, very important. Peter Vessenes, according to him doesn't share that opinion, and he also doesn't know some technical facts about Bitcoin Anonymity. Taking this into account, how do you think I should change the thread title?

I'm still stunned. It seems that, from THE Bitcoin Foundation announcement, all of a sudden we need some representants to handshake VISA, banks and governments and anonymity=the_sure_end_of_bitcoin.

Probably the next startup will be "THE Bitcoin concentration camp" where all of you, foundation fanatics, could reeducate the last libertarians that still fight for the Satoshi project.

RED = You fail hard.

Fact of life, BTC do get stolen, BTC are use for hideous crimes.  Don't you think BITCOIN is facilitating these enough already ?
Anonymous by default would surely kill bitcoin in the long run.

How about you start a mixing service and I pay you to report the IPs of people who stole my BTC ?  Seems like a win-win situation.

No, the foundation ensures it is one of many paying for development.  (if nobody else pays anyone else, then, yes, it is the only one paying)

Anyone can

• Join the dev team
• Hire your own dev team

and participate in the open source process.

That is why we make it so easy to fork the code: easy software replacement and easy dev replacement.

Obviously you can't certify an anonymous business.  The certification is a big goal of the foundation.  The people certifying can't be anonymous either.

The other goal is preventing forks in the Bitcoin network, and designing changes.  The foundation ensures its the authority by paying for development.  I think paying "foundation taxes" and voting don't require giving up anonymity, that's what public key cryptography is for.  Voting is best when it's anonymous.  

Although, that is really plutocracy instead of democracy.  If you think that each person gets one vote, no matter how much money they contribute, then anonymity doesn't work.

Oh, and Satoshi is the most anonymous "person" I know of 

Well, it is trivial to watch stolen coins move through the blockchain.  You don't know who has them etc.

I love it when people cannot read.  Let's look at this post a little bit more carefully: "often people can be determined".  This is not only factually correct, but it certainly takes into consideration the case where somebody uses some extra effort to anonymize themselves.

If you don't follow me, please look up the word "often", then read this paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PASSAT/SocialCom.2011.79

Obviously people disagree with me, but I don't believe having an infiniteish number of addresses to potentially work with gives anyone real anonymity automatically. You have to work damn hard to stay anonymous and by default bitcoin doesn't give rise to privacy beyond the "numbered bank account" that swiss banks used to have. You're only anonymous as long as you aren't doing anything with your money. The second you spend it your invisibility cloak is chipped away at, no matter how small. The government or anyone else could always honeypot you  and gradually figure out more and more about your real identity over a large amount of time.

Being anonymous is an individuals responsibility and is crazy hard work to really do. Ironically the people who really need anonymity are the ones that have the hardest time really getting it. That said, I think everyone should work hard to be anonymous, if only because it gives even greater safety to the few who really need if it we are all practicing responsibly. I don't think Bitcoin itself lends itself to being anonymous any more then the internet itself lends itself to being anonymous. In theory yes- but when the internet interfaces to the real world: then not so much.

Either way, it seems like a reasonable and practical assumption to work on bitcoin without a focus on anonymity to push it forward. As long as nothing is added to bitcoin that deliberately makes it less anonymous, then no fault, no foul, no?

This is a strategic decision. Think about it. Now that the Internet is here, not even the most repressive government can keep their citizens from blogging and reading western media. But that only happened because the Internet got here.

Oh hay! No scandal this week? Well lets do some Character assassination to keep ourselves busy.

I'm sure you're right about that and I didn't think thru my example very well. You would still need to be careful as some time later that change address will get combined into another transaction that may be identifiable. My intent was mainly to make it clear that anonymity isn't as easy as pushing a trx to a site without traceable IP or logs. You have to consider both before and after the transaction in question.

Despite these and other theoretical ways to trace I'm not aware of an example of anyone provably tracking stolen funds to date. Anyone?

FYI: Being absolutely anonymous is technically impossible on the internet and in real life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity

The thread title is bombastic and poorly chosen. However:


+21000000


+21000000

I would have been far more comfortable about the BF if it had been created with additional privacy advocates like Falkvigne on its board, instead of pure business interests.  I trust Jon Matonis, but he will clearly be  outnumbered in any decisions that where market growth is pitted against privacy.  Similarly for USA-centric versus non-USA representation.

If it had simply been called "Bitcoin Chamber of Commerce" instead of "Bitcoin Foundation", and adopted a charter limiting itself to advancing Bitcoin business adoption and nothing else, I think the privacy constituency would feel a lot less threatened.  But the minute you call yourself generically "Bitcoin Foundation", it creates an expectation of balance and fairness.  And certainly, as it stands today, privacy interests and non-USA interests appear to have gotten the short end of the stick, via a less-than-transparent board creation process.

It's the nature of the code that Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous.  You can't wish anonymity upon the code just because you feel a certain way (i.e. "sentiment").  Look what's happened on this forum alone...people get scammed and now the SEC is apparently involved in a particular case.  This means that people are tracing Bitcoin transactions as we speak and connecting transactions to various persons.  This all happened before the Bitcoin Foundation; none of this is new.  Any radical change to the protocol would likely require a forking of the blockchain anyway and the success of that fork would be determined by a miner vote, i.e. hashing power.

Besides, look at how many people use Bitcoins and run to file a complaint as soon as they've been scammed.

Moreover, look at the value of Bitcoin itself.  The only reason Bitcoin has the fledgling economy that it does is because of the exchanges.  Without exchanges as centralized value markers, people wouldn't be buying any goods or services.  And yet only a handful of people are shouting for the exchanges to close operations despite the fact that the exchanges go against the "sentiment" of Bitcoin (i.e. they involve 3rd parties that happens to collect your name, address, and several forms of identification). Maybe in the long, distant future we won't need a centralized exchange, just as in the future Bitcoin might not need a "Foundation" so to speak.

The Foundation will bring more organization to the community.  The community needs it now, just as it needs the exchanges now.  In the future, maybe they won't be needed.  But seriously, there are so many other aspects about Bitcoin to highlight than its anonymity factor

I think THIS is the disturbing sentiment that the OP was initially responding to, not whether Vessenes believes bitcoin is anonymous or not, but the sense that he doesn't CARE about anonymity.

I remember arguing with MNW once about anonymity with regards to bitcoin, and he kept pushing this whole transparancy/openness mantra. This attitude seems extremely prevalent on the west coast (Vessenes's coinabul is Seattle based), with the whole San Fran tech scene throwing a party over social networking and posting every personal tidbit about your life on the internet for all to see. This is a recent phenomena stemming from the social networking trend of late --- this is not the original intellectual foundation of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was founded on the cypherpunk tradition, which itself traces back to the early days of cryptography. "Openness" and "transparency" are silly key words that the california tech media loves to bandy about, and as we are increasingly seeing with Facebook, are in fact VERY dangerous. We ought to have the CHOICE whether or not to disclose information in an open and transparent manner, and the key to that is ANONYMITY.

Bitcoiners: Treating the issue of anonymity in such a casual, careless manner is effectively shitting on the very foundations that gave rise to this technology and this community. The Bitcoin Foundation has, in my eyes, expressed a strong desire to further Bitcoin in a positive direction and this I believe is worthy of commendation. With that said, it MUST affirm its commitment to this principal ideal.

You beat me to answer this, and your post is better then was mine.